Research Projects

• Nederlab, Texts and tools for historical Dutch corpora. Principal Investigators: Hans Bennis and Nicoline van der Sijs. Subproject Tools, written by Antal van den Bosch and John Nerbonne. Gosse Bouma assumed responsibility for this late in 2012.
• Gabmap, a web application for measuring dialect differences. Project Directors: Charlotte Gooskens and John Nerbonne
• Building ICT Research Capacity in Uganda NUFFIC project with 30 Ph.D. candidates in a broad range of computer and information science. Director: John Nerbonne
• Mutual Comprehensibility of Dutch Varieties (in Dutch) De onderlinge verstaanbaarheid van taalvariëteiten in de lage landen: Linguïstische en attitudinele determinanten NWO program (Flemish-Dutch Committee) aimed at investigating the tension between dialects' distinctiveness and their comprehensibility. P.I.s: John Nerbonne and Dirk Geraerts.
• Determinants of Dialect Variation NWO program aimed at investigating dialectometrical explanations of pronunciation and syntactic variation. P.I.: John Nerbonne
• Measuring Linguistic Unity and Diversity in Europe Project sponsored by the Volkswagen Stiftung aimed at applying dialectometric (and other techniques) toward language contact. P.I. Erhard Hinrichs.
• Scratch, a project sponsored by NWO applying language processing techniques to the retrieve hand-written documents. P.I. Lambert Schomaker.
• Learning Computational Grammars, TMR Postdoc Network, applying Machine Learning to Language. Coordinator: John Nerbonne
• GLOSSER Computational Linguistics serving language learning. P.I.: John Nerbonne

Ph.D. Projects supervised

1. Jirí Zamečník, Disfluency prediction in natural spoken language
   1ter Gutachter : Prof. Christian Mair, Freiburg. (JN Zweitgutachter)
2. Proscovia Olango A Document Enrichment Approach to facilitate reading comprehension Jan 20, 2020.
   Promotor: Prof. Henk Sol, Groningen (Economics & Business). JN second promotor.
3. Franz Manni Linguistic Probes into Human History July 6, 2017.
   Prof. Serge Bahuchet, Musée de l'Homme, Paris, was second promotor.
4. Sandra Hansen-Morath, Regionale und soziolinguistische Variation im alemannischen Dreiländereck. Quantitative Studien zum Dialektwandel. Albert-Ludwigs Universität, Freiburg. Defense date: May 13, 2016.
   1ter Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Peter Auer; JN was 2ter Gutachter.
5. Jelena Golubovic Mutual intelligibility in the Slavic language area. May 2, 2016.
   Co-promotor: Dr.Charlotte Gooskens (JN and Vincent van Heuven were promotors).
6. Femke Swarte Predicting the mutual intelligibility of Germanic languages from linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. 3 March 2016.
   Co-promotor: Dr.Charlotte Gooskens (JN and Vincent van Heuven were promotors).
7. Oscar Strik. Modelling Analogical Change: A History of Swedish and Frisian Verb Inflection. 15 Oct. 2015.
   Promotor: Prof. Dr. Muriel Norde (JN and Arjen Versloot were second promotors).
8. Ken Decker. Orthography Development for Creole Languages. 20 Nov. 2014.
   Co-Promotor: Dr. Charlotte Gooskens
9. Jacky Benavides. Measuring the historical city. The reliability of historical land surveying methods and thier use in virtual urban cartography. 3 July 2014.
   Second promotor: Prof. Charles van den Heuvel; Co-Promotor: Dr. Elwin Koster
10. Harm Brouwer. The electrophysiology of language comprehension: A neurocomputational model. 26 June 2014
    Promotor: Prof. Dr. John Hoeks (JN was second promotor)
    Harm Brouwer won the 2015 Glushko prize for outstanding dissertations in cognitive science. It is awarded by the Cognitive Science Society
11. Fridah Katushemererwe. Computational Morphology and Bantu Language Learning: An Implementation for Runyakitara 25 June 2013. Co-promotors: Dr. Rehema Baguma and Dr. Arvi Hurskainen
12. Gideon Kotzé. Complementary approaches to tree alignment: Combining statistical and rule-based methods. 24 June 2013. Promotor: Prof. Dr. Gertjan van Noord (JN was second promotor)
13. Daniël de Kok. Reversible stochastic attribute-value grammars. 11 Apr. 2013. Promotor: Prof. Dr. Gertjan van Noord (JN was second promotor)
14. Marjoleine Sloos. Phonological Grammar and Frequency: An Integrated Approach. Evidence from German, Indonesian and Japanese. 28 Feb. 2013.
    Promotors: Prof. Dr. John Nerbonne and Prof. Dr. Jeroen van de Weijer, Shanghai
    Co-promotors: Dr. Charlotte Gooskens and Dr. Dicky Gilbers.
15. Kostadin Cholakov. Lexical Acquisition for Computational Grammars. A Unified Model. 5 Nov. 2012. Promotor: Prof. Dr. Gertjan van Noord (JN was second promotor)
16. Martijn Wieling A Quantitative Approach to Social and Geographical Dialect Variation cum laude 28 June 2012. Prof. Dr. R. Harald Baayen was second promotor.
17. Çağrı Çöltekin Catching Words in a Stream of Speech: Computational Simulations of Segmenting Transcribed Child-Directed Speech 8 Dec. 2011.
18. Barbara Plank Domain Adaptation for Parsing cum laude 8 Dec. 2011.
    Promotor: Prof. Dr. Gertjan van Noord (JN was second promotor)
19. Peter Nabende Applying Dynamic Bayesian Networks in Transliteration Detection and Generation 2 Dec. 2011.
    Co-promotor: Dr. Erik Tjong Kim Sang
20. Anja Schüppert Origin of Asymmetry. Mutual Intelligibility of Spoken Danish and Swedish 14 Nov. 2011.
    Co-promotor: Dr. Charlotte Gooskens
21. Jelena Prokić Families and Resemblances 29 Nov. 2010.
22. Therese Leinonen. An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Pronunciation in Swedish Dialects. 1 July 2010. Winner of the 2010 prize of the Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur, (Royal Gustav Adolph Academy for Swedish Folk Culture) including 25,000 Swedish Kronor, awarded 6 Nov. 2010.
    Co-promotor: Dr. Charlotte Gooskens
23. Tim Van de Cruys. Mining for Meaning. The Extraction of Lexico-Semantic Knowledge from Text. 24 June 2010
    Co-Promotor: Dr. Gertjan van Noord
24. Robert G. Shackleton, Jr. A Quantitative Examination of English-American Speech Relationships. 17 June 2010
    Second Promotor: Prof. William Kretzschmar, Jr.
25. Geoffrey Andogah. Geographically Constrained Information Retrieval 21 May 2010
    Co-Promotor: Dr. Gosse Bouma
26. Francisco Borges Parse Selection with Support Vector Learning 18 Feb 2010
    Co-Promotor: Dr. Gertjan van Noord
27. Ismail Fahmi Automatic Term and Relation Extraction for Medical Question-Answering Systems 14 May 2009
    Co-Promotor: Dr. Gosse Bouma
28. Lonneke van der Plas Automatic Lexico-Semantic Acquistion for Question Answering 23 Oct. 2008
    Co-Promotor: Dr. Gosse Bouma
29. Jori Mur Off-line Answer Extraction for Question Answering 23 Oct. 2008
    Co-Promotor: Dr. Gosse Bouma
30. Marco René Spruit Quantitative Perspectives on Syntactic Variation in Dutch Dialects Amsterdam, 26 Mar. 2008
    Promotors: Hans Bennis and John Nerbonne
31. Tamás Bíró Finding the Right Words: Implementing Optimality Theory with Simulated Annealing 7 Dec. 2006
    Recipient of the AVT/Anéla prize for the best linguistics dissertation in the Netherlands in 2007. See prize committee's remarks (in Dutch).
    Co-Promotors: Dr. Gosse Bouma and Dr. Dicky Gilbers
32. Hideotoshi Shiraishi Topics in Nivkh Phonology 14 Sept. 2006
    Co-Promotor: Dr. Tjeerd de Graaf
33. Leonoor van der Beek Topics in Corpus-Based Dutch Syntax 10 Nov. 2005
    Co-Promotor: Dr. Gertjan van Noord
34. Robbert Prins Finite-State Preprocessing for Natural Language Analysis 12 May 2005
    Co-Promotor: Dr. Gertjan van Noord
35. Begoña Villada Moirón Data-Driven Identification of Fixed Expressions and theri Modifiability 24 March 2005
    Co-Promotor: Dr. Gertjan van Noord
36. Susanne Schoof An HPSG Account of Nonfinite Verbal Complements in Latin 6 Dec. 2004
    Co-Promotor: Dr. Gosse Bouma and Dr. Gerry Wakker
37. Tanya Gaustad Linguistic Knowledge and Word-Sense Disambiguation 1 Nov. 2004
    Co-Promotor: Dr. Gertjan van Noord
38. Wouter Jansen Laryngeal Contrast and Phonetic Voicing: A Laboratory Phonology Approach to English, Hungarian, and Dutch 27 May 2004.
    Co-Promotor: Dr. Dicky Gilbers
    See also his summary (in Dutch) with online demo.
39. Wilbert Heeringa Measuring Dialect Pronunciation Difference using Levenshtein Distance 8 Jan 2004, cum laude
    See also Related papers, etc. on exact techniques in variationist linguistics
40. Stasinos Konstantopoulos Using ILP to Learn Local Linguistic Strcutures 28 Nov. 2003
41. Tony Mullen An Investigation into Compositional Features and Feature Merging for Maximum Entropy-Based Parsing 22 Mar. 2002
    Co-Promotors: Dr. Rob Malouf and Dr. Miles Osborne
42. Rob Koeling Dialogue-Based Disambiguation: Using Dialogue Status to Improve Speech Understanding 25 Jan. 2002
    Co-Promotor: Dr. Gertjan van Noord
43. Ivilin Stoianov Connectionist Lexical Processing 23 Mar. 2001
44. Erik Tjong Kim Sang Machine Learning of Phonotactics 19 Oct. 1998
45. George Welling The Prize of Neutrality : Trade Relations between Amsterdam and North America 1771-1817. A Study in Computational History 25 June 1998
    Second Promotor: Prof. Leo Noordegraaf
46. Mettina Veenstra Formalizing the Minimalist Program 11 June 1998
    Co-Promotors: Dr. Gosse Bouma and Dr. Jan-Wouter Zwart